This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The modern Games' claim to ancient ideals of unity has coexisted uneasily with their repeated use as a stage for nationalist and political conflict. Nazi Germany used the 1936 Berlin Games as a platform for political propaganda, filling the city with monumental architecture designed to present the regime as a modern, welcoming power. The Games instead produced one of the era's most quoted counter-narratives when the African American sprinter and long jumper Jesse Owens won four gold medals, a result Nazi officials could not accommodate within their own racial ideology.
The Cold War brought two of the largest disruptions in the Games' history. The United States led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games after the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union led a retaliatory boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games four years later, each time keeping dozens of nations' athletes from competing. South Africa was excluded from the Games entirely from 1964 to 1988 over its apartheid policies, a ban lifted only after the country began dismantling the system.
The Games have also been a target of political violence directly: at the 1972 Munich Games, the Palestinian militant group Black September took eleven Israeli athletes and coaches hostage, killing all of them along with a German police officer in a botched rescue attempt. Ancient Olympia observed its own political concession to competition, the ekecheiria or Olympic Truce, under which Greek city-states were expected to suspend wars around the festival; the modern movement has revived the truce as a symbolic annual United Nations resolution, though, as with its ancient predecessor, it remains a plea more often honored in word than in practice.